Comment by andymasley
2 months ago
10 gallons of fuel's worth of energy could be used to ask ChatGTP 100,000 questions (assuming 3 Wh per question) or power a digital clock (1-2 W) for 35 years. If you assume you ask ChatGPT 8 questions per day, it's using exactly as much energy as a digital clock. Personal use of ChatGPT is much closer to the clock.
The marginal difference of someone sitting or not sitting on a specific flight isn’t 10 gallons of fuel. It’s the capacity of the entire aircraft making that trip / number of passengers that gives 10 gallons on average because if more people make a trip eventually you need an extra aircraft.
So on an apples to apples comparison ChatGPT including training, hardware, etc uses a fuck of a lot more than just 3 Wh per question.
The training cost adds a minuscule amount to the marginal cost of each search. The best sources I can find on training GPT-4 say it used 50 GWh of energy to train. GPT-4 is being used for a lot more than ChatGPT, but even if we assume that ChatGPT is all it's used for if we divide the total cost of energy by the total number of ChatGPT searches it increases the cost of each search by 10% (I go into this in the post) raising the marginal cost including training from 3 Wh to 3.1 Wh.
Not so fast, billions of investment wasn’t spent on just 50 GWh of electricity.
The final step of training one specific model might have used 50 GWh which only costs what 0.011 billion? What the fuck do you think they are spending the rest of that money on?
And what do you think environmental impact of that spending was?
3 replies →
Sorry but this doesn't add up and it's not fixable because the argument is broken and I doubt the numbers are even in the right order of magnitude when considered in context. (That's before considering that it also had the effect of you writing and sharing this post - what's the second-order-effecf of people seeing it increasing their use as result of that and resharing the same idea with their peers etc? What's the network effect of your digital clock?)
You are rationalizing your laziness in an attempt to cope with the negative effects that you truly deep down know are there.
2 replies →